Premium & luxury brand eCommerce, Merchandising, Website Design

Optimizing for Local Search

Many websites, especially those that only sell online, are not maximizing the potential that local search optimization offers. It isn’t uncommon for pure play online businesses to think that their geographical location is of little importance since they sell on a nationwide or worldwide basis. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In today’s online world where the web has become hyper-competitive, local search is a must for any online business that wants to maximize their sales opportunities. More and more, people are no longer simply searching by product or service related keyword phrases. They’re searching for product and service phrases followed by geo-targeted terms including their city or state.

So why would someone care about where you’re located if you only sell online anyway? Think of it this way, clearly stating who you are and where you’re located adds more credibility and trust to the decision of doing business with you. Also, the number of people looking to buy online from local companies is increasing due to various reasons such as supporting local businesses and a greater sense of security this provides in case service is needed after the sale.

Clearly stating your address throughout your website also benefits your customers on the other side of the country or even the other side of the world. For example, someone from New York sees that your business address is in Seattle, which immediately takes away the mystery of who they’re dealing with to a large degree, since you have established your business as being a real business with a real address, opposed to simply a mysterious website in cyberspace.

Your physical address followed by your phone number should be on a minimum of your home page and contact page. Although the best option is to have this information clearly posted on the bottom of every page of your site.

Keep in mind that simply having your address on every page of your site isn’t going to optimize your site for local search, since this may not provide enough keyword weight to raise your site in the search engine rankings. Therefore, your site must be specifically optimized for key local search terms along with your product or service offerings.

In addition to optimizing your website for local search, you should submit your site to local search services such as the following.

Every day, millions of people are searching for products and services online using geo-targeted search terms such as their neighborhood, city, state and even country. If you’re not actively optimizing your site for local search, you’re business is leaving a lot of money on the table for those that are. Is your site fully optimized for local search?